Thankfully the astronomer who spotted this wayward star didn't "shake it like a poloroid." ;)
Posted on 02/08/2005 10:16:16 PM PST by anymouse
Thankfully the astronomer who spotted this wayward star didn't "shake it like a poloroid." ;)
Space/astronomy ping
So you can't help but wonder what would happen should the Earth get swallowed by a black hole. Kinda puts all of humanity's problems in an eerie perspective, doesn't it?
Holy cats!! Isn't that well past the speed of light (186,000 mph)? So what happened to all the nay-sayers who have said that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light? Pass the crow, gentlemen ....
Make that per second.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
That would be 186,000 miles per second, not hour, for the speed of light.
I'm slow ... goin to bed now ... at 186,000 microns per hour.
Speed of light is 670,600,000 mph
But 1.5 millon miles per hour is still 416 miles per second.
I wouldn't want to be near this thing if it came back. It may go into some orbit!
There's no point in doomsday type blackhole scenarios, considering you and your greatX2,500 grandchildren wouldn't live long enough.
Oops! Well, math was never my strong point. (Hm, how could you tell ...? LOL!) Thanks for the corrections, all.
But that's still darned fast.
As said before, it's 186,000 miles per second - that translates to 669,600,000mph. That star is only moving at 0.224% of the speed of light.
Its hard to say how extreme gravitation and time lensing would affect a biological system.
However - the star was not swallowed up, so its unlikely it would "kill anything in the system" - however passing so close to it would certainly distort and alter orbits.
Mass, proximity, angle, speed, mass of orbiting bodies, speeds, equatorial planes of orbit, etc etc. If we had EVERY factor (unlikely) we could simply plug in the numbers and get a result.
>That would be 186,000 miles per second, not hour, for the
>speed of light.
For those of you who like myself be ignorant, that's 670,615,200 miles per hour, well faster than the piddling 1.5 million miles per hour this star is going.
Just looked it up here:
http://www.convertit.com/Go/ConvertIt/Measurement/Converter.ASP
1.5 million/miles/hr =416 miles/sec which is
.00223675 of the speed of light
Actually, to be ultra accurate, 670,614,120
=]
Well, one of the stars in a binary system *was* swallowed, at least by my reading of the article.
Even if potential planets were close enough to the remaining star to stay in its orbit, and not have their orbits radically altered - I was more interested/worried in the resulting radiation from the swallowed star's demise.
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